Haunting Borders

Yesterday, all I did for the entire day was haunt Borders. Borders is an excellent place to haunt. They have ready-made spaces for haunters--though admittedly, those spaces have become few and far between since they moved all the chairs back to the café section. They used to have chairs all over the place, but I think someone wised up to the fact that dedicated readers sitting in the café are...

Plugging Away at Edits

I never thought I would become one of those grouchy editors who breaks your heart by telling you to rearrange your story! Okay, so I'm never grouchy about telling people that, and I really hope I'm not breaking hearts. But being an assistant editor, I have already run across some stories that are solid gold--if only most of the plot were shuffled around. Sigh. It's hard to give that kind of...

New Year's Start on Queries, Editing

The holidays are finally at an end! Between Thanksgiving, preparations for Christmas, Christmas itself, and New Year's, I've been off my regular schedule (writing and otherwise) for about two months straight. But now I'm back! And instead of making New Year's Resolutions to foster new and better habits, I'm focusing on the habits I need to get back into. Here's my list of things to do. I'll be...

Tuesdays With Tuesday–Week 3

Welcome to Tuesdays with Tuesday. For last week's installment, go here. Tuesday So, my post is a couple of days late. Things happened this week--things I didn't really want to talk about right away. But now events are escalating, and I have to write it all down to try and make sense of it. On Monday, a detective visited our office. Yes, you heard right. An honest-to-goodness chain-smoking modern...

Thwarted Desires

When director Steven Spielberg first watched the recent movie hit "Paranormal Activity" (at that time just a low-budget indie film), he found it successfully scary and wrought with frightening tension. He had only one complaint; change the ending. Though the film succeeded in scripting, acting, tension and creativity, the ending alone could have been enough to sink it. Why? Because the original...